Instruments of DarknessRecently, completely by accident, I picked up a copy of Alfred Price's Instruments of Darkness: The History of Electronic Warfare which (in the main) tells the story of the competitive development of radar capability during World War Two. (It does exten...

And that's the last of the DPhil Interviews completed...It feels momentous, but probably isn't, but today, the last of the DPhil interviews were finished. This does bring some major factors into consideration, the main one being that I have close to twenty hours of recordings to transcribe. I can feel carpal tu...

Cyber Security and the Retail Sector - A Prize Winning EssayAs a general rule I don't tend to do a lot of 'academic' stuff, but for reasons too arcane to go into I entered a competition being run by the British Retail Consortium to write an essay on the cyber challenges faced by the retail industry. Now, the essay...

Curiouser and curiouserSomereports suggest that it was not spread by a phishing email [1] (althoughsome hedge their bets by saying that it ‘could’ be, with some suggestions thatthe attackers had a pre-existing foothold that allowed the initial infection tooccur, [2] orthat i...

Thoughts on the wannacry virus and the importance of starting assumptionsThis waswritten just as a piece to see what happens to the potential outcome of a pieceof analysis when basic assumptions change. I’m not admitting whether I think any of the below is accurate (except forthe facts I have taken from others’ primary foren...

Instruments of DarknessRecently, completely by accident, I picked up a copy of Alfred Price's Instruments of Darkness: The History of Electronic Warfare which (in the main) tells the story of the competitive development of radar capability during World War Two. (It does exten...

Encryption Back DoorsDon't worry, I have no intention or revisiting the reasons why a 'back-door' is not only a bad metaphor for what the Government claims to want to do, but also a stupid thing to do. That said, it is interesting that it now seems to be a Home secretary rite o...

On the Subject of Public DenialsSo, GCHQ denied that they had wire-tapped Trump Tower to get round US law that would prohibit the NSA from doing the same. 1. This is the same organisation that, according to the Snowden files, installed Malware on a NATO and EU country's telecommunication...

Thoughts on Wikileaks "Vault 7"Having spent a couple of hours looking at some of the documentation released by Wikileaks (yes, my life is that empty), some initial thoughts. 1. Firstly, one would have thought the CIA would have looked after these better. If this is from a CIA repository...

Philip Hammond's Examples at the Opening of the NCSCAt the opening of the NCSC last week (my invitation to which I imagine must have been lost in the post) Philip Hammond cited three cases (Sony, TV5, Talk Talk) of the scale of impact of high profile cyber-attacks leading to the declaration of "So, this new ...